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Bottom line: The Board found “agnés b. VOYAGE” logo not confusingly similar to “VOYAGE”.

The applicant filed an international trademark application for “agnés b. VOYAGE” logo shown below designating advertising, retail and wholesale services for clothing, footwear, jewelry, bags, luggage and personal ornaments, etc. in Class 35.  The examiner cited two following marks: “VOYAGE with its transliteration in katakana” for clothing, etc. in Class 25 and “VOYAGE” for advertising, etc. in Class 35 and other services in Classes 36, 38 and 42.

<Applied-for mark>

The designated goods of the applied-for mark are partially identical with those of the cited marks.  So, the question is whether the applied-for mark is similar to the cited marks or not.

The Board analyzed the applied-for mark and found as follows:

The applied-for mark is composed of “world map”, “agnés b.” and “VOYAGE”.  All elements are well-balanced and unified as a whole.  “agnés b.” is a well-known trademark of the applicant.  The distinctiveness of either “world map” or “VOYAGE” is not stronger than “agnés b.” since a world map is commonly adopted as a part of a trademark and voyage is a French dictionary word meaning travel.  Accordingly, the mark will be pronounced [agnés b. voyage] as a whole or [agnés b.]  It is not likely that “VOYAGE” functions as a source identifier independently.  Therefore, it was inappropriate that the examiner extracted “VOYAGE” from the applied-for mark and found it is similar to the cited marks.

And so the Board reversed the refusal, and granted registration of “agnés b. VOYAGE” logo.